Facial recognition software

Do these lemurs look identical to you? New face recognition software can tell them apart. Bernard Castelein/Nature Picture Library/Getty Images Goodbye chunky ear tags and radio collars, not to mention dart guns and tranquilizers. Soon it may be possible to use non-invasive computer-assisted facial recognition to study and track endangered mammals in the wild, according to results of a study just published in BMC Zoology. Researchers first developed a computer-assisted facial recognition system to identify individual lemurs in the wild based on their mug shots. The system, LemurFaceID, is able to do so, in part, by ignoring the effects of facial hair and ambient lighting during the identification process. The scientists tested their system using pix of wild, red-bellied lemurs from Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park. After 100 trials, the results showed LemurFaceID had a 98.7 percent success rate (plus or minus 1.81 percent). Lemurs live in the trees of Madagascar, an island off … [Read more...] about Wild Lemurs Get Their Own Facial Recognition Software

Facial recognition may not be the high-tech policing solution it's purported to be, with new figures showing facial-recognition software used by the UK's Metropolitan Police returned incorrect matches in 98 percent of cases. According to figures published by The Independent (based on data obtained under freedom of information), only two of the 104 alerts generated by the facial-recognition software used by Met Police were found to be accurate matches.The Independent also reports software used by South Wales Police has returned more than 2,400 false positives since June 2017. Facial recognition software is capable of scanning video footage and identifying individual faces to match with a database of known faces, such as wanted criminals. The software reduces each face to a map of biometric identifiers (such as the length of a person's nose and the distance between their eyes) and is capable of making a match in a fraction of a second.The technology is also in use in countries such … [Read more...] about Facial-recognition software inaccurate in 98% of cases, report finds

In a self-congratulatory move, Microsoft announced some major improvements today to its fundamentally biased facial recognition software. The Azure-based Face API was criticized in a research paper earlier this year for its error rate—as high as 20.8 percent—when attempting to identify the gender of people of color, particularly women with darker skin tones. In contrast, Microsoft’s AI was able to identify the gender of photos of “lighter male faces” with an error rate of zero percent, the study concluded. Like other companies developing face recognition tech, Microsoft didn’t have enough images of black and brown people, and it showed in its recognition test results. Microsoft’s blog post today puts the onus primarily on the data it used when building the facial recognition software, stating that such technologies are “only as good as the data used to train them.” Considering the predicament, the most obvious fix was a new dataset … [Read more...] about Microsoft ‘Improves’ Racist Facial Recognition Software

Late in July, lawmakers sent a letter seeking details on Rekognition, Amazon’s in-house facial recognition software. Amazon wrote back, blandly, in August, but according to this increasingly impatient group of congresspeople, the company “has failed to provide sufficient answers.” The initial inquiry was timed around a damaging ACLU report that found Rekognition—software the company has sold to law enforcement and pitched for use by Immigration and Customs Enforcement—had incorrectly matched the faces of 28 members of Congress with individuals included in a database of mugshots. Backlash against the deployment of this potentially faulty software came also from within Amazon, with employees signing a June letter to management demanding it cancel Rekognition contracts with law enforcement. Many of those employee concerns were shared by congresspeople Markey, Schakowsky, Jayapal, Khanna, Chu, and Lewis, who wrote in today’s letter that they felt … [Read more...] about Lawmakers Ask Jeff Bezos for Information on His Facial Recognition Software, Less Nicely This Time

Google has had a lawsuit in Illinois over its facial-recognition software thrown out, with a judge dismissing the case on the grounds that the plaintiff in the case did not suffer “concrete injuries,” Bloomberg reported on Saturday. The ruling puts to rest one of three lawsuits against major tech companies for alleged violations of the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), with the Verge noting that cases against Facebook and Snapchat are still pending. Individuals in Illinois who believe their rights under BIPA, the nation’s strongest biometrics privacy law, have been violated can sue for damages. Bloomberg wrote that plaintiffs in this case alleged that Google violated BIPA by collecting facial recognition data without express user consent, specifically by extracting millions of “face templates” from images uploaded to the cloud-based Google Photos service. The plaintiffs further alleged that Google scanned the faces of people who had … [Read more...] about Google Has Lawsuit in Illinois Over Facial Recognition Scanning in Google Photos Dismissed